


Forever in the Old Square

by limned



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 04:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limned/pseuds/limned
Summary: Lupin was in New Orleans just the once, years ago.  It’s changed since then but underneath, it’s really the same. The tourists still look in all the wrong places.





	Forever in the Old Square

The tourists come looking for ghost stories and voodoo. Trampling through the Saint Louis cemeteries and peering at anything with Marie Laveau’s name stamped on it. All the voodoo knickknack shops have a dust-crusted altar of statues and coins, beads and dried chicken feet, and a sign threatening death on anyone who touches it.

Lupin was in New Orleans just the once, years ago. It’s changed since then but underneath, it’s really the same. The tourists still look in all the wrong places.

He Apparates into a dark corner just off Rampart and the thick hot air hits him like a slap. And it’s also been years since he tried a single crossing of this distance, so he spends a few minutes retching in the bushes before he can move on. Dawn in London, night over here. Wet leaves brushing at his neck as he straightens up and tries to cough the sick out of his mouth. He’s right by the park, closer than he expected to be, and lucky he came out on this side and not swimming in the Mississippi.

As he crosses into the Quarter there are slim young men watching him speculatively from a corner doorway, and he avoids two smiling offers. Does his best to stay calm as his feet hit the other side of Rampart.

He makes a quick pass through the old places even though he’s almost certain they won’t be there. Decatur Street is clean beyond anything he would have imagined twenty years ago. Souvenir shops where dirty bars used to stand. Tourists and suited businessmen instead of longshoremen and whores. He’s not sure it’s very much of an improvement.

After some walking, he finds what he’s looking for in front of a hamburger takeaway on Canal. Right on the edge of their space, which he should have known.

“—get some change, man? Cigarette? A kiss? Come on, something?”

A boy and a girl, equally grubby. They smell of magic and too-bright awareness as they relax on dirty spotted concrete and chirp out to people who pretend they don’t exist. 

When Lupin stops they focus on him instantly. Tourists give money quickly or walk away faster. They don’t stand and stare with flared nostrils.

Two beats as they size him up. He returns their stares calmly, or tries to. It's confusing to look at them directly; the color of their skin seems to move within several shades depending on how he aims his eyes.

“What d’you want, wizard?” The boy, very lightly curious. He has pieces of metal through four different parts of his face.

“I’ve come to speak with you.”

The boy cocks his head. “All of us?”

Lupin’s read all he can, talked to everyone he could find, but he still doesn’t know enough about their structure. No one truly knows, or at least no one he could find. He takes the safe route. “If possible, yes.”

“About what?” The girl now. Her eyes gleam in the light from the neon street and she looks about sixteen.

“There is trouble in Britain.”

They stare at him like he hasn't actually said anything. The girl flips an unlit cigarette between her fingers, moving it like Muggle magicians float coins.

People flowing around behind him. Lupin can smell their drunkenness, their mild hysteria, and he takes a breath to center himself. “It may spread, even this far. I came to tell you. To see if your neutrality is assured.”

The boy smiles first, but it’s a close thing. Both of them regard him with open amusement for a few seconds, though by the time Lupin opens his mouth to speak again they’ve already scrambled easily to their feet.

“Okay,” says the girl agreeably. “The others will get a kick out of you.”

“I assure you, I didn’t come to entertain.”

She looks like she wants to laugh at him. “Yeah, whatever. Come on. Be careful, though. You understand how we are?”

“I do.”

He could hardly not. The raw warning of this place has been scratching at all of his senses since the moment he crossed over Rampart. He's too old for this, can’t ignore it like when he was young. He'd be running for the other side of Canal if he didn't have a mission.

The girl is still looking at him with the same slight half-smile. “Watch yourself, then. You’ll make the young ones nervous. Not many doubles over here.”

Lupin nearly asks what she means, and then doesn’t. Wizard-werewolf. He could tell her there aren’t many like him in Britain either, that he’s accustomed to making people nervous, but he doesn’t bother.

As he starts after them, a passing trio of older women shoot him such revolted glances that he realizes how this little scene looked. Middle-aged man in a shabby suit propositioning street kids, for drugs or sex or both. But the women are away before he can do more than flush, and then he’s chasing after the kids

_(ancients)_

and Bourbon Street hasn’t changed all that much. Raised paving in the middle of the road, puddles of wet and occasionally chunky things along the curb. His nose gives him far too much information. Most of the people are drunk enough that they aren’t walking straight lines. He finds himself weaving like them simply to avoid collisions. Everywhere people are drinking, large plastic cups of liquor or cheap beer. The watery-sweet piss that most Americans call beer, anyway. He remembers Sirius’s disgust, and how he hunted until they found an old man who kept Harp and Guinness on corner pulls.

So long ago. He’s tired, here on the wrong side of the Atlantic, chasing after creatures he doesn’t understand. The music from the doorways thumps into his ears.

After some blocks they swerve off to the right, walking more swiftly with less people in the way. They turn left past the hulking cathedral in the dark and he sees the girl tip her head back and smile toward the sky.

There’s nothing there when Lupin glances up, but it doesn't erase the feeling that something was.

He looks back down and it takes a few seconds before he can see them again. Although they're right there, leaning against a black metal gate and watching him. “Come on,” the girl says, and the boy chuckles as they push open the gate and walk inside.

The passageway is narrow and overhung with the same green leaves from the park, thick enough that Lupin can barely see in the dim light. He hurries to keep up with the blurred shapes of his guides, blinking. It seems like a weirdly long time before they reach an open space at the end, a wide courtyard lined with flat white stones around the edges.

When he crosses the stones, the joints of his left hand ache with sudden mild pressure. He flexes them automatically and the staccato pops make several people glance up. But not for long, and with strange knowing glances.

The boy flicks a smile when he sees Lupin frowning. “Alarm system, man. Only happens if people have magic. If they don’t know, it ain’t enough to make them run screaming.”

“If they don’t know?”

“Lots of old Creole families around. Cajun from the country too. They been bred thin but the lines are still here. Some with magic, they don’t know, they never heard.”

“Oh. They aren’t… the American schools don’t find them?”

“Not all of 'em. And we want to know if they wander in.”

“I see.”

He doesn’t, not really. It seems like they could block out wanderers completely if they wished. That path was almost like walking uphill against a river. And it’s doubtful he could cast even a _Lumos_ spell here without imploding himself, so great is their stranglehold on the ebb and flow of these blocks.

By the time he looks up again, they’ve gathered. Young and sharp and all around him, watching, settled into old chairs and on the edges of iron balconies.

.

He can’t tell if they listen. He thinks he speaks well. It isn’t terribly different from talking to the covens in Iceland or the Akwesasne shamans in Ontario. It goes on longer, maybe, but ends the same way. They offer him a smoke and he takes it. The tribe drifts away with no commitment.

“Remus? Time for a walk, kid.”

It could be the smoke filling his head, or the novelty of being called a kid by someone who looks like she should be wearing Hogwarts student robes. Either way he lets the girl wind an arm through his elbow and lead him outside.

He doesn’t know where they are, at first. It takes a block before the cathedral orients him. The girl walks silently, warm against his side.

They’re crossing the wide pedestrian street to the cathedral park when a group of exuberantly drunken men pass in the other direction. One of them is singing an old song in a beautiful tenor, something about a watch chain, and the girl looks at him and murmurs under her breath, “Good evening, young Bordelon,” and laughs.

When Lupin blinks down at her, she says amiably, “His great-grand-père used to visit me every Tuesday.”

“Visit you?”

She gestures across the square toward a section of the redbrick buildings that surround it. “It was a brothel for maybe thirty years. I was there for six.”

“Oh.” His reactions are slow; he can’t hide a twitch of shock.

The girl laughs again, eyes bright. “I look too young for that? Three centuries ago I looked almost too old for marriage.”

Lupin doesn’t know what to say in response to that, and luckily she saves him the trouble by reaching to open the gate of the park and shepherding him inside.

He has a very strong impression that no one is supposed to be in this park at night. They’re alone except for fifteen or twenty cats, sitting or sprawled in various places on the stone walkways. The sound is also dampened like they aren’t in the middle of a city. If he tries he can see the people passing on the other side of the iron fences and the gaslights flickering on a few buildings, but it looks muted and unreal like it’s much farther away.

“Remus,” the girl says, and he turns to find her sitting on a nearby bench.

He knows that she’s wearing a gray shirt and dirty cargo shorts and and her hair is hanging loose in a mass of braids, but for a brief flash he sees her in something different, something wide-skirted and narrow-waisted from a century or two ago, hair piled up high with curls spilling down.

Lupin squeezes his eyes closed and opens them again. She’s wearing frayed combat boots again instead of high-laced shoes.

He sounds tight and thready to his own ears when he says, “It’s strong, here. Your magic is so strong.”

“River to Rampart, Canal to Esplanade, this is the place where we are made,” she chants, low but still somehow ringing through the air. “You know our boundaries. Anyone with magic could follow the edge with their eyes closed.”

“Yes, we did. It was—“

He stops cold, because he shouldn’t have said that.

But the girl is just looking at him, no trace of surprise, and all hints of the laughter and ease are gone, vanished so thoroughly that they might never have been. “You stupid fucking wizard,” she says, flat and soft. “I know why you really came back.”

He feels like she's kicked him in the chest. He knew—he hoped, maybe their community would remember him from before, but not like this.

“You want to see him?” she says, even softer. “Okay.”

And she smiles.

.

He gets about nine seconds.

_—standing near the motorcycle that Sirius stole in Biloxi and drove too fast for all the miles to New Orleans, seventeen and invincible in the humid air, Sirius pressed up tight against him, arms slung around his waist, Sirius’s teeth nipping bright lines on the curve of his neck before lifting his head to say, “Told you we’d get here, Moony,” and diving in to kiss Remus fast and slick, exactly the way he drove the bike, and Remus laughs against his mouth and hauls him closer, closer—_

.

He’s gasping when it ends, finds himself down on his knees with his fingernails scraping at the walkway stones.

When he looks up, the girl’s smile gone again like it never existed. “You know what we can do. But we can’t help you.”

“You—“

“Showed him to you, and I won’t bring that spirit here. He wouldn’t be the one who left you. He’d be the boy who came here twenty years ago. You think he would want to stay, in these few blocks? River to Rampart, his life forever? He wouldn’t.”

“He _would_ , with me.”

“No. He’d hate you for it.”

“ _You lie_.” Lupin thinks he’s shouting, and knows he is shaking, furious like nothing he’s ever known. He thinks there must be wards to keep him from attacking.

The girl is tiny and straight, so very still. The shadows make her almost part of the bench and the stone and the oak trees around her. “I don’t lie. We have seen enough to tell. He couldn’t stand this life. He would go crazy in a dozen years. He would hate you.”

“ _Never._ He wouldn't, he would never—you don’t _know_ —“

She stares at him. Gimlet eyes shining in the light and for an instant Lupin can see all of her centuries.

“Please…” He’s choking on a thousand explanations for everything she doesn’t understand. How he needs Sirius so badly that he’ll make anything work. Anything. Millennia within these blocks, river to Rampart, Sirius hating him. It doesn’t matter.

“No.”

He wants to kill her for refusing, he wants to hurt her. Oh god, he wants someone to hurt like he does. Before he’s aware of moving his hand is groping toward the wand in his pocket and

_(blood and entrails rending and screaming in smoke)_

and Lupin jerks, slipping back into this world, falling against the ground, vaguely aware that his hands hurt very badly, greasy sweat on his forehead and the ashen taste of fear sitting on his tongue.

“Don’t try that again, wizard.” The girl’s expression hasn’t changed but her voice is deadly. All the hair stands up on his body, the wolf inside him whining with terror. “You’re grieving. We can feel that. But reach for your magic again and you will cease to exist.”

Everything is still now, not just the girl. On a square where dozens of people should be wandering drunk. Even the leaves on the trees are still.

He swallows hard, choking out, “Please… I know you can do it, I’ll give you anything, anything—“

“We know who should join us. You and your boy will not.”

Lupin sobs once, a harsh reflex that tears through his chest. “Please, no, I can’t—”

She stands up and watches and her pity is like cold stones on his face. “You have until dawn to go. Don’t come back here, wizard. We have nothing for you.”

He lies mute, his mouth working helplessly.

“Goodbye.”

She doesn’t seem to move but fades away, in stuttering jumps like his eyes have forgotten how to work. He doesn’t know if it’s their magic or the joint or the tears burning in his eyes. All together, probably. And his heart, breaking again.

_Sirius._

Then nothing but the trees and the old redbrick buildings all around. Leaning over him like a shroud. Their den won’t be there if he tries to go back. He can feel that much. He won’t be able to find them again.

After some time Lupin rises and stumbles toward the nearest gate. It opens silently and nobody looks at him as his shoes hit the stones in front of the cathedral, nobody looks at him at all. The brass music rising from the men along the benches, random noises of people around the square again, laughter and shouting, the happiness of strangers. He hates them.

He has until dawn. He thinks now it will be easy to find a place with Guinness on corner pulls. Sit beside them and have a drink or ten, and try to find the strength to go back across the ocean.


End file.
